Dear Logan,
I’m very sorry to hear that you are in a coma.
Or maybe you have amnesia.
Or you lost the use of your writing hand and are learning to write with your other hand, which we both know would be saying something since even with your good hand your penmanship is atrocious.
Or, wait, maybe the White House is out of paper.
Oh my gosh! Is the White House out of paper?! You’d think that would be in the newspapers that my dad brings, but I could see where it might be a national security risk. No wonder the press is keeping it hush-hush.
Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.
Who am I going to tell?
Maddie
Logan’s coat was red. Which was a good thing. For now. There’s a reason the redcoats were pretty much doomed during the American Revolution. He stood out like a beacon among the huge trees and big rocks and leaf-covered ground that was getting slicker and slicker with every passing moment.
So Maddie didn’t have to get too close to keep them in her sights. Plus, Logan must have made it his mission to kick every rock and break every branch he came across. Maddie was glad of it. As soon as the agents realized he was missing they should be able to track him down.
If the agents realized soon.
If the light held.
If the tracks didn’t wash away.
If the whole forest didn’t fall asleep beneath a blanket of snow and ice.
Someone has to come help, she wanted to scream.
Someone other than Maddie.
She heard the man yell something at Logan—“Less water. More walking.”
And the air around Maddie got even colder. She knew the accent even if she didn’t know the voice. It was one she still heard sometimes in her nightmares. On those nights, Maddie slept with her back to the wall and her hatchet by her bed. If her ghosts followed Maddie to Alaska, that was fine, she told herself. She was going to be ready.
But now she was hunching down behind a fallen log and watching as Logan and the kidnapper kept going.
But Logan had stopped. And turned. And Maddie knew he’d found the bracelet.
Which meant Phase One was working. If Logan knew she was alive and she was here, then maybe he would stop acting like an idiot who didn’t care if he got himself killed.
It had taken all of Maddie’s strength not to scream when Logan had picked up the rock and crept toward the gunman’s back. Logan was ready to kill, and Maddie couldn’t blame him. In Alaska, people hunted to survive all the time. But Alaska was also the kind of place where being stupid would kill you, and Maddie knew they might have only one chance. They had to make the most of it.
When Logan’s red coat moved farther out of sight, Maddie left her hiding place and went to the deep tracks that Logan had left in the muddy ground. Then she picked up the end of the log she’d been hiding behind. It had been down for years, she could tell, rotting and decaying in the near constant moisture, and it was almost light as Maddie picked it up and swung it around. She dragged her knife through the bark, drawing an arrow and pointing the way.
Her dad would know that the log had been disturbed. Even if snow gathered on the top, any idiot would be able to see the arrow on the side, high enough that the snow and ice shouldn’t cover it.
Someone had to see it.
Maddie told herself that her father would be landing soon. Logan’s detail was probably out right then, searching and calling for reinforcements.
Soon. Someone would catch up with her soon.
Unless her dad’s job had complications …
Unless his plane broke down or the storm came in faster than anyone was expecting …
Unless no one realized they should be looking in this direction …
Unless somehow, for some reason, she couldn’t keep Logan in her sights …
Help has to come, Maddie told herself for what had to be the thousandth time.
But there are things you tell yourself. And there are things you know. And Maddie knew that the only person she could depend on was herself.
But that’s okay, she thought. I’m usually enough.
Maddie took one last look at the marker she was leaving behind, then pulled her hood tighter around her face and started up the hill.
She had to keep up. Or, better, get ahead. The best hunting always happened when the prey came to you. Maddie could lie in wait. She could be prepared. She could have a plan and then hope and pray that Logan’s stupid boy brain and stupid boy ego didn’t get in the way of what she already knew would be a perfectly logical, smart-girl plan.
But first Maddie had to figure out where.
Not where Logan and the kidnapper were. But where Logan and the kidnapper were going to be.
That was Phase Two. And without Phase Two there could never, ever be a Phase Three. Which was important because Phases Four through Twenty were pretty much “hope” and “pray” and “try to get really, really lucky.”
“Where are you … ?”
Maddie trailed off when she heard the sound of the water. The hill they were on was steep and rough, and one whole side was more like a cliff than a mountain. As Maddie crept toward it, she knew even before she pushed aside the thick green branches of the evergreens what she was going to see.
This part of Alaska was full of rivers and streams—massive ravines cut by glaciers centuries ago and dug deeper by the water that ran through them almost all year long.
The waterfall was proof of that.
The kidnapper could hide out in this forest for days if he wanted to. The Secret Service would have satellites trained on the cabin, but the mountains were covered with trees. As long as they kept walking—kept covered—then they were invisible from the sky. Which was smart. But the kidnapper had to know that someone would find them eventually. Logan was the president’s son, after all. People would be looking. Lots of people. And soon.
So they had to be planning to get Logan out of there. Out of Alaska. Judging by the kidnapper’s thick accent, probably even out of the country. After all, Russia was pretty close. Closer than the rest of the US.
But there were no roads in this part of Alaska. Which meant they had to take Logan out by boat or by plane, and they were moving away from the coast, which meant plane.
Which meant …
Maddie looked back at the waterfall, the deep, rough ravine that ran between the mountains, and just like that she knew where they were going—and what she had to do.
But how—how was another question entirely.
She was so busy thinking, running through options and possibilities, pros and cons, that she didn’t pay attention to where she was stepping, not until it was totally too late.
Maddie heard the snap almost at the same moment that she felt the pain.
And then she found herself leaping, falling, and skidding across the uneven ground and rolling through the mud and the muck. Water was seeping through her jeans, and Maddie knew she needed to get her feet under her but her left leg felt like it was on fire.
It wasn’t, though. It was just cut and bleeding. Her jeans were ripped and Maddie was almost afraid to pull back the denim and examine the deep stab wound in the side of her calf. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Maddie knew this like she knew her own name.
In a weird way, she’d been lucky, Maddie realized as she forced herself upright and hobbled to the old, rusty trap that had been set at some point in the past fifty years and then abandoned. The mechanism must have rusted through the decades. That’s why Maddie had a flesh wound and not a leg that would never really work right again.
For a second, she just stood there, breathing too hard, feeling lucky to be alive.
Then her breath grew deeper and her heart started beating hard for an entirely different reason.
She might be bloody and hungry and covered with mud. She might not have friends, teachers, classes, cell coverage, adequate food (for the moment), or any prayer of finding help anytime soon.
But—Maddie smiled—she did have a plan.